Le Blanc begins his response by claiming
that my book review’s “obvious purpose is to persuade the reader
that Tony Cliff’s book is little more than a mass of ‘egregious
misrepresentations’ and ‘has so many gross factual and political errors that it
is useless as a historical study of Lenin’s actions and thoughts.’ This is a
demolition job. It doesn’t offer much that we can use and build on as we face
the challenges of today and tomorrow.”

I
drew my conclusions about Cliff’s book only
after I closely studied what Lenin said and did and compared it to what
Cliff claimed Lenin said and did. The more I studied, the more striking the
divergences became.

As
someone who was a member of the US International Socialist Organization for
many years and used Building the Party as
a text to (mis)educate people on Lenin and the Bolsheviks, the nature, scale
and pervasiveness of Cliff’s distortions continually shocked me as I discovered
them.

Le
Blanc evades my documentation of Cliff’s distortions and ignores whether the
evidence I presented in my book review supports my conclusion. Instead he rejects
my conclusion from the outset because he does not share it and makes spurious
charges against me and poorly documented assertions about the history of the
Bolshevik party.

Le
Blanc criticises me for not “offer[ing] much that we can use and build on as we
face the challenges of today and tomorrow”. My 6000 word piece was a book
review, a comparison between what Cliff said about Lenin’s words and actions
and Lenin’s actual words and actions. A book review of Building the Party is not the place to discuss revolutionary
strategy for the historic Occupy uprising, a topic I have addressed at length in
“Occupy and the tasks of socialists”.

No
one on the US socialist left has written a response to that piece despite its
international circulation and if Le Blanc is interested in discussing the “challenges
of today and tomorrow” I suggest he start there instead of Cliff’s book.

Le
Blanc continues:

As it stands now, the
comrade makes reference, with that unfortunate self-assurance, to the “secret
expulsions and other abuses of power by party officials that plague all ‘Leninist”
organisations’”. One can certainly find examples of this in one or another
group (even those not self-identifying as “Leninist”), but as someone who has
belonged to more than one organisation considering itself to be Leninist, and
as a scholar who has studied other such organisations, I must challenge this
assertion that “secret expulsions and other abuses of power” plague all such
organisations that I have belonged to and studied. It is simply not true.

Sadly,
two of the “Leninist” groups Le Blanc belonged to engaged in such practices, the
first most dramatically in the 1980s under the reign of Jack Barnes and the second
more recently during the past two years (and perhaps earlier as well; most group
members know almost nothing of the group’s history).

I
speak with self-assurance because I was alerted to these events by some of the
individuals involved. In the digital age expulsions even in the most secretive organisations
can no longer be done without anyone knowing. All it takes to find about such
incidents is a bit of diligence, curiosity, and a Google search.

Le
Blanc states: “The problem is (and no serious historian of the period
disagrees) that Lenin and Krupskaya and Bolshevik supporters in Russia actually
did put together a network of Bolshevik groups in Russia operating separately
from the Menshevik faction.”

This
is not a problem because I never argued otherwise. What I challenged and what Le
Blanc did not address in his reply to me was Cliff’s claim that Lenin organised
“a completely new set of centralised committees, quite regardless of Rule
6 of the party statutes, which reserved to the Central Committee the right
to organise and recognise committees”.

Does
Le Blanc agree that Lenin broke rule six by organising “completely new”
committees after the 1903 congress? Yes or no?

Le
Blanc:

What
[Binh] fails to note, however, is what is said by others active in the movement
at that time (the well-documented account of Bolshevik-turned-Menshevik Solomon
Schwarz, Krupskaya’s memoirs, Trotsky’s biography of Stalin) about the actuality of just such a debate. In a scholarly
dispute with me on the matter, Lars Lih, while minimising its significance, at
least acknowledges the fact that there was such debate but argues that Lenin
was wrong about the realities and unfair to those Bolshevik comrades on the
other side of the debate, who outvoted him.

The
debate at the 1905 third congress was over how
to recruit workers, not whether to recruit
workers. No one argued against
recruiting workers to party committees as Cliff claimed.

On
the myth that the Bolsheviks formed a separate party from the Mensheviks in
1912, Le Blanc says:

A more knowledgeable
historian than Comrade Pham, Isaac Deutscher (hardly a Cliff adherent), in The
Prophet Armed: Trotsky 1879-1921 (page 198), tells us: “Early in 1912, the
schism was brought to its conclusion. At the conference in Prague Lenin
proclaimed the Bolshevik faction to be the Party.” Trotsky says the same thing
in his biography of Stalin (page 136): “Having thus gone all the way in
breaking with the Mensheviks, the Prague Conference opened the era of the
independent existence of the Bolshevik Party, with its own Central Committee.”
Gregory Zinoviev, who was involved in the 1912 Prague conference, recounts in
his History of the Bolshevik Party (page 170) that this was the moment
“to break finally with them [the Mensheviks] and build our own independent
organization based upon the resurgent workers’ movement”. In a succinct
biography of Lenin (page 112), the highly respected Lars Lih affirms that Lenin
decided to cut the Gordian Knot of factional strife “by simply deciding that
his group was the real party,” elaborating: “After a series of institutional maneuvres,
the so-called Prague Conference of January 1912 – consisting of Lenin,
Zinoviev, and about fourteen Bolshevik practiki from Russia – elected a new
Central Committee and thus a new party.” In Reminiscences of Lenin,
Krupskaya explained (pages 230, 231): “The results of the Prague Conference
were a clearly defined Party line on questions of work in Russia, and real
leadership of practical work. ... A unity was achieved on the C.C. without
which it would have been impossible to carry on the work at such a difficult
time.”

Not
one of these pieces of evidence comes from a primary source. These
accounts were written more than a decade after the events of 1912 (in Lars T.
Lih’s case almost a century elapsed since).

Le
Blanc does not address or explain Lenin’s
words (words I quoted in my review) to the International Socialist Bureau
written in 1912:

In
all, twenty organisations established close ties with the Organising Commission
convening this conference; that is to say, practically all the organisations, both Menshevik and Bolshevik, active
in Russia at the present time. (My emphasis.)

Le
Blanc does not mention the text of a resolution passed
by the 1912 Prague conference:

The Conference deems it its duty to stress the enormous
importance of the work accomplished by the Russian Organising Commission in
rallying all the Party organisations
in Russia irrespective of factional affiliation, and in
re-establishing our Party as an all-Russian organisation. The activity of the Russian Organising Commission, in which Bolsheviks and pro-Party Mensheviks
in Russia worked in harmony, is to be all the more commended since
it was carried out under incredibly trying conditions due to police persecution
and in face of numerous obstacles and difficulties arising out of the situation
within the Party. (My emphasis.)

Worst
of all, Le Blanc resorts to quoting Zinoviev’s History of the Bolshevik
Party in a misleading way to support his claim that the Bolsheviks formed a
separate party from the Mensheviks at the 1912 Prague conference. Here is the
full, unabridged sentence from Zinoviev:

After
the 1908 conference, and more especially after the 1910 plenum, we Leninist
Bolsheviks said to ourselves that we would not work together with the liquidator Mensheviks and that we were
only awaiting a convenient moment to break finally from them and form our
own independent organization based upon the resurgent workers’ movement. (Le Blanc
excluded the words I emphasised.)

Le
Blanc’s evidence proves that it was the “liquidator Mensheviks” that the Prague
1912 conference broke with, not the Mensheviks as a whole. If he, Cliff,
Trotsky and Deutscher are right that the Bolsheviks formed a party separate from
the Mensheviks at the 1912 Prague conference then Lenin, Zinoviev and the 1912
Prague conference resolution are wrong.

When
our views about history are contradicted by facts we should modify our views to
better fit the facts, not change the facts to fit our views. I hope Le Blanc as
a professor of history can agree with me on this despite my status as a rank
amateur.

[Pham
Binh’s articles have been published by Occupied
Wall Street Journal, The Indypendent,
Asia Times Online, Znet, Counterpunch
and thenorthstar.info, a collaborative blog by and for occupiers from across
the US. His other writings can be found at www.planetanarchy.net.]

Comments

This is a very important discussion. In my view the debate about the 1912 break is so fought because most people do not realise what Lenin and the Bolsheviks fought for, the method of the united front which fought principles uncompromisingly but used the maximum flexibility to achieve the maximum clarity. After the ‘definitive’ break with the Mensheviks in 1912 there remained joint Bolshevik-Menshevik branches until after 1917. Not liquidationism because the Bolsheviks marginalised the leadership and won the best revolutionaries from the ranks thereby. True the Mensheviks swelled their ranks thereafter but not with any type of confused revolutionaries, they crossed class lines then, and supported the counter-revolution which the centrist, pre-1917 Mensheviks did not. So important to understand what a centrists organisation is and what a counter-revolutionary Stalinist/Menshevik organisation is. And even then remember what we understand is not want the masses understand; we must always fight for clarity with the methodology of communist, the United Front. I hope to review all these articles in SF9